Category Archives: Crochet

I call him The Spirit of Christmas.

I just realized how hopelessly out of date my projects list in Ravelry is. And I never put probably 2/3 of my stash in there in the first place. And I’m always leaping into conversations I don’t have time to get back to.

Hopefully pics of my latest later. I have to figure out how to take pictures now that the light is so inadequate. *sigh* I’m a lousy photographer, probably at least in part because I don’t enjoy it.

Oh well. Such is such.

Today’s task? Completing the holiday goodies I’ve been working on. There’s something that’s just not quite working for me that I can’t put my finger on, so it’s time to just sit down with hook and thread and doodle until it *does* work.

You should have seen the expression on my face when the husband mentioned that Thanksgiving is next week. NEXT WEEK? How the hell did THAT happen? For the love of love, where does the time go?

My experiment with what Laurie calls “those dangerous pointy sticks” (:D) is going fine. Of course, even *I* can’t screw up a log cabin square in a nice, sturdy acrylic. LOL. Seriously, it’s a freeing thing for me to discover that I can knit even minimally. I struggled trying to learn it as a kid and I feel all accomplished now.

One of the things that I’ve found interesting about this experimental bicraftuality is the way that the contrast with knitting has made me more aware and appreciative of crochet’s unique properties. I’d love to give you an example but it’s more an overall feeling than a direct observation. I’m having a tough time summing it up.

I’m a little weirded out by the way I find myself regarding this as art; I haven’t really shared some of the things I’ve been experimenting with, because (being experiments) progress is slow and I want to find my own way for the moment. It’s a weirdly solitary thing, even as I get drawn deeper into the online crochet universe. (Can I say how freaking wonderful it is to be able to be among people who do this? Even when I lurk I feel more like the quiet one in a gathering of friends than an outsider looking in.) But in addition to my love for the sorts of useful little things that mostly populate my etsy shop, I’m developing a love of the less-directly-useful-but-insanely-beautiful, more-traditionally-art-like stuff, which surprises the hell out of me, quite frankly.

Just goes to show you never can tell where life’ll lead ya. 😉

Ever have a project that just kicks your ass?

This would be one of mine. The hardiest, in fact, having been started, as near as I can figure, early in 1999. It might have been earlier. I know I remember working on it in my apartment out by Fresno State, which I moved into in January of that year. In resurrecting it I’ve run across a bit of cat hair, which suggests that I actively worked on it while still at my parents’ house, which would put it anywhere between 1996 and 1998. It was started, though, after the “train ‘ghan” I mostly made while running back and forth from Fresno to Vallejo on Amtrak in service of a bad relationship. Those trips stopped in April or May, I think, of 1997 so it dates to after that, because that ‘ghan wasn’t quite done at that point.

In any case, it’s somewhere between 8 and 10 years old, and about half done.

Incidentally, this is the one time that I’ve had anybody comment assuming that the yarn I was buying wasn’t for me; one of the ladies at Wal-Mart remarked on how sweet I was to buy yarn for my grandmother. I don’t think she believed me when I told her it was for me, but no matter. I’m the one it’s been following around for the last ten years.

(Note the mad MS Paint skillz. *snicker*)

So I got, oh…maybe half done with making all of these little four-round granny squares and I got bored, right? So I started putting them together. Only problem is that way back when I had no clue what I was doing. As far as I can tell from looking at it, I added a cluster at the join every time I went around a set of joined squares, so the pieces of the thing I’d put together wound up hopelessly distorted. It’s been sitting like that for years. I’m pretty sure I haven’t let it out of the box since I left for Pensacola in late 2000.

I suppose I feel compelled to finish the thing just because I’ve moved it so many times.

Unfortunately, though, that means that I’ve got a lot of frogging to do, because all of those sections that I joined, then tortured? Have to come apart now.

*bangs head on wall*

It’s great for my ego, though. It really is. Because it’s a fabulous demonstration of just how much I’ve grown with this in the last little while. And how cool is that?